Late last year, Creative launched a website and teaser campaign for a new product called Zii, with the only clue being its tagline: "Stemcell computing". While you can argue whether or not it's smart to focus attention on such a sensitive subject, the product that has rolled out of this campaign today is quite tantalising.

now they didn't call it human, did they? And the only reason you only hear about human stem cells in the media is because those are relevant to human medicine, of course. Most organisms will have stem cells. And so they called it that because it can adopt any function, much like any stem cell - not so far fetched, is it?

So it's a dual-core ARM processor with a very powerful (and interesting) graphics card that is not really explained in any materials I can find. On the plus side the clock speed suggests they've got power under control (max 266MHz), but they don't quote watts and general-purpose FLOP numbers. The address space is only 1GB, which is a questionable decision when the world is moving to 64-bit to get more than 4GB. Some of the media processor materials quote the figure of 100GFlops (for the media unit only?), which isn't supercomputer power, really.

Too little information is given to know whether this is something to be excited about or just another lark.

That's exactly what I was thinking while watching the video on zii.com. Not only the architechture, but the use cases (image processing, HD video and 3D graphics) look exactly like those for which Sony and Toshiba are pitching the Cell.

The main difference seems to be that the Zii targets portable devices whereas the Cell to my knowledge does not.

Thom, stem cells per se are not generally a sensitive subject. Adult stem cells, for example, generally raise no ethical hassles; nor do stem cells obtained from a placenta, or from umbilical cord blood.

What is a sensitive subject is embryonic stem cells, since some people object to the killing of a human embryo to obtain them.

How does this idea of a programmable processing unit differ from Transmeta's Big Thing? (which incidentally seems to have fallen completely off the radar--what happened to them anyway?)

Transmeta died, or more correctly, in 2005 they restructured and became a corporation that licenses low power semiconductor intellectual property.

Their processors used something like JIT, where in theory it'd be possible to replace the CPU's JIT compiler with a JIT compiler for a different instruction set (but in practice there was never enough documentation to allow anyone to do this, and from what I've heard the CPU's native micro-ops were so close to 80x86 that other instruction sets weren't practical). Of course "something like JIT" may be an exaggeration, and it may have been something more like replaceable microcode.

I'm not too sure how Creative's 'processing elements' work - they sounds like FPGAs to me.

Reminds me somehow on the C-One-thing - reconfigureable computing. When I talked with Jeri Ellsworth some years ago, she gave me the impression that reconfigureable computing is the thing of the next computer revolution.
Unfortunately she left Jens alone on the C-One project...

After reading through some of the documentation, this is very much like a Cell processor, with some important differences.
The 2 ARM chips are 32-bit only: One runs the OS, the other is an application co-processor, whatever that means. While they hype the 24 media processing elements,
their docs clearly state that it's 3 arrays of 8, where each element of an array runs the same code.
This gives it a very strong Cell-like arch when compared to the PPE with multiple SPEs that the Cell employs.
Also, each Zii array cluster has its own DMA controller.

With only a 1 GB address space, its not taking over the desktop or the console but with the listed capabilities, we could be looking at some very cool and powerful toys.

After reading through some of the documentation, this is very much like a Cell processor, with some important differences.
The 2 ARM chips are 32-bit only: One runs the OS, the other is an application co-processor, whatever that means. While they hype the 24 media processing elements,
their docs clearly state that it's 3 arrays of 8, where each element of an array runs the same code.
This gives it a very strong Cell-like arch when compared to the PPE with multiple SPEs that the Cell employs.
Also, each Zii array cluster has its own DMA controller.

With only a 1 GB address space, its not taking over the desktop or the console but with the listed capabilities, we could be looking at some very cool and powerful toys.

To me it look a bit more like the SIMT (Single Instruction Multiple Threads) model nVIDIA introduced with CUDA, just that you can have up to three kernels executing at the same time, but I have not delved much into the Zii's architecture, but just reading off your comments and others...

To me it look a bit more like the SIMT (Single Instruction Multiple Threads) model nVIDIA introduced with CUDA, just that you can have up to three kernels executing at the same time, but I have not delved much into the Zii's architecture, but just reading off your comments and others...

Their docs call it a SIMD arch so I don't think you can run multiple simultaneous kernels - not on the array clusters anyway